It's just fun and games

Pokémon GO: Power Up or Evolve and what to do first?

13 July, 2016

Just like 10 million other Android users, I installed Pokémon GO. After catching my starter Pokémon, in my case: Squirtle, I soon started catching some other Pokémon. After a while, I had 5 Pidgey’s and decided to take a closer look at them in my inventory.
The first things I noticed were the two buttons: Power Up and Evolve. So that’s what Stardust and Candy are used for! To be able to evolve your Pokémon was expected, but immediately I started wondering what to do; Power Up first and then Evolve or just Evolve and then Power Up later.

The answer is quite easy for this version of Pokémon. I will try to explain by comparing Pikachu and Raichu (Evolved version of Pikachu). CP (Combat Points) are the only thing in Pokémon GO that determining how strong a Pokémon is. A fully levelled Pikachu will always be weaker than a Raichu. In previous Pokémon games, this wasn’t always the case because other stat points were important as well, like Speed where Pikachu would be faster than Raichu. So you will have to evolve if you want to get the strongest version of the Pokémon!

Next question is, should I save Candies and evolve as quickly as possible? The short answer is yes. In the long run, it will cost the same amount of Stardust and Candy to Evolve first and then power up as the other way around. There is, however, one important aspect that makes evolving first the best option! That is the fact that the attack moves your Pokémon has learned, change after evolving. This means you can be very unlucky with your evolved attacks and you wasted all your Stardust and Candies powering up first.

The next question I will try figure out is if (which I think is the case) and how the maximum CP differ between Pokémon of the same sort, so stay tuned!